Cold. He wasn't fond of cold, but he'd got all too used to in on Rura Penthe. Covering his ears would be a good idea, though, to say nothing of warmth; so far as he knew no race of Terrans anywhere had ever had pointed ears. The tattoos would probably be noticeable enough, he thought, even without the rest.

Fourteen years. Well, it was better than almost three hundred fifty. "You speak the language well, though," he said. "The customs can't have changed so much they'd be unrecognizable, I would think." He'd hope, anyway. He needed to learn from this--not so much about the time itself, since he couldn't know when or where they'd make port again--but about Terrans in general. Known thine enemy and all that, even if his only actual enemy was Kirk. Kirk was human, ergo learning about humans would give Nero some advantage. It made sense in his fragmented brain, at least.

It would, he thought, almost against his will, be interesting. In all his off-world trips as a miner he'd never visited many inhabited planets, and what little he'd seen of Earth from his ship had been--well, fascinating. So much water...but he wasn't about to say so. Not out loud.

Now, finally, he looked away. "I don't want to go back," he said, and he meant it. There was nothing to go back to--without his ship he couldn't finish what he'd started, and it seemed one of his two main enemies was already here. "If I really am dead and this is the afterlife--" he snorted, still not fully able to accept that this was, in fact, it "--all I want to find is my wife." If the ship worked like he was beginning to think it did, he was no longer surprised she wasn't here. Mandana had certainly been nothing like Shinzon, or what he himself had become. She needed no Warden, though he could see her being one.

Did he want to? No. Was that going to stop him? ...Also no. One of the few things that had resigned Nero to the fact that he was (eventually) going to die was the thought that whenever he did, he'd find Mandana again. Now, though...he had no idea how to find her, where she was or how he might get there--or even if he might.

"She's dead, too," he said, after a long pause. "Long before me. I thought I would find her again in the afterlife, but this--was not the afterlife I expected. What point was there to dying, if I still don't have her?" Not that he'd had a choice in the matter, but still. He hadn't been a religious man in life, but he'd at least half-believed in the Romulan version of the afterlife, and this was definitely not it.

That raised another thing that had been troubling him since he arrived--something he wouldn't really let himself think of. Did he want her to see him now? He was hardly the husband she'd known, a quarter of a Terran century ago. She might not even recognize him, and he didn't know that he wanted her to. Not as he was now. Mandana was Romulan; she might well understand what he did to Vulcan, but there was also a chance that she, more forgiving than he, might not.

He laughed, quietly and quite without humor. "Redemption?" he said. Redemption from what, he wondered. Even yet he felt what he had done to Vulcan was fully justified, but what he'd become since then...Nero wasn't a stupid man, however fractured his sanity might be. He knew he'd changed, but, except for when he thought of Mandana, he hardly cared. It was only thought of her that made him even want to care. "There are some on this ship who would tell you that's impossible." Kirk, for one, most definitely.

He gave Ian a curious look, quirking one of his upswept eyebrows almost imperceptibly. "They did tell you what I did before I died, didn't they?" Most humans, he would think, would be of Kirk's mindset--genocide, even in revenge, wasn't something they were likely to forgive. Terran concepts of honor and vengeance were, from all he could tell, incredibly lax compared to those of Romulus. Formerly of Romulus, at least in his timeline.

That was something he'd not really given any thought to. Fate and the universe had conspired for over twenty-five years to make his life as terrible as possible, and when he'd first arrived he thought it was just continuing to do so even in the afterlife. The idea of redemption--he wasn't even sure what it meant, not for him. It looked, however, as though he was going to have plenty of time to find out, whether he wanted to or not.

"I wonder," he said, finally voicing the question that had troubled him since he got here, "who decides these things? How do we arrive here?" What was it that thought him capable of redemption? Clearly it wasn't connected to the Federation in any way. "And why anyone outside of my own people would consider me worthy of this 'redemption'." He eyed Ian, curious and almost challenging. "Do you think me capable of it?" A human's perspective on the whole thing would be...interesting. Certainly Ian didn't seem even a quarter so judgmental as Kirk, but Nero knew so little of humans in general, let alone in particular, that he couldn't even try to guess accurately.